UD composer releases new CD/DVD

Composer Jennifer Barker, associate professor of music at UD, is a native of Scotland.

11:26 a.m., June 2, 2005--For composer Jennifer Barker, the creative process often begins with a visual image--a picture in her mind, perhaps of a ruggedly beautiful mountaintop in her native Scotland--and the music flows from there.

Now, the associate professor of music at UD has taken the process full circle by creating video images to match some of the music she previously composed. In what is believed to be a first-of-its-kind endeavor for the classical genre, her new CD of five original chamber compositions comes packaged with a DVD that includes music videos for four of the pieces.

“We wanted this to be a groundbreaking project, and I think it is,” Barker said. “Classical musicians have talked for some time about trying to do videos the way pop music does, but as far as we know, we’re the first to actually do it.

“And, we believe this is the first classical CD to come with a bonus DVD. We’ve heard a lot of interest from other classical musicians, who are eager to see how our project turns out because they’re considering doing the same kind of thing.”

All the pieces on the traditional CD, titled Geenyoch (Scottish for “ravenous”), were recorded on campus, in Loudis Recital Hall of the Amy E. du Pont Music Building. The cover photo showcases the Steinway piano in the University’s Bayard Sharp Hall, which also is the setting for portions of the video.

The CD-DVD package is the first product offered by a new label, Meyer Media LLC. Founder and director Andreas Meyer also works at Sony Music Studios, where he has won four Grammy awards as a producer and recording engineer for a variety of renowned classical musicians. Creating Geenyoch’s videos was a first for him as well as for Barker, she said.

“Even though he had never done a music video before, this project was his idea, because he thinks this is the way the industry is heading,” she said. “He intends to be very selective with Meyer Media and to make it a top-quality label, so I was delighted at the opportunity to be its launch CD.”

Barker, whose previous CD, Nyvaigs, was released in 2000, has won awards in each of the last five years from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which recognizes composers whose work is performed most often.

Barker said her pieces lend themselves well to the video format because she composes in a “programmatic,” rather than an abstract, style. She had specific Scottish mountain ranges and other outdoor settings in mind when she wrote some of the pieces that now are on the new CD, so it was natural to film that same scenery for the accompanying videos.

The videos include indoor footage as well. The scene filmed in Bayard Sharp Hall, for example, was designed to mimic a 19th-Century salon, with a small group gathered around the piano to hear a performance. The “audience” consists of UD music students and faculty, in contemporary formal dress, while the video of the pianist alternates shots of him in modern attire with images of him in a 19th-Century-style costume borrowed from the University’s Professional Theatre Training Program. The images fit the music, which reflects both modern and earlier romantic influences, Barker said.

Also appearing on the CD and in one of the videos is a quartet of musicians that includes Xiang Gao, UD associate professor of music and an internationally known violinist, performing on the University’s recently acquired 200-year-old violin by G.B. Ceruti.

For Barker, making the music videos was a learning experience that was more challenging than she had imagined.

“We filmed over the summer, and I was editing the video until January,” she said. “It was a huge undertaking, very different from my experience making recordings. By contrast, my previous CD had music that I had written over many years, but the whole thing was recorded in a single weekend.”

However, she said of the DVD, “I’d do it again. It was a great experience, and I love the way it turned out.”

Barker said she learned to take advantage of the unexpected while filming, particularly during some outdoor scenes in Scotland. In one instance, a flutist was seated near a river, and while she played her solo, a bird flew across the frame of the camera in a slight downward path. Instead of deleting that, Barker said, she edited the video so that the bird’s flight corresponded to part of the composition in which the flutist was playing a descending scale.

Another time, a fisherman happened by and was filmed in the background of a scene, and once, “We got a free butterfly,” Barker said. Both appearances seemed to fit the music and so remain in the video, she said.

In addition to the four music videos, the DVD also features an interview with Meyer and behind-the-scenes looks at how the videos were made. Barker said she hopes the pioneering effort--which is being sold in retail music stores (including Bert’s Compact Discs at 90 East Main St. in Newark) and soon will be available on the Internet at [www.meyer-media.com]--might appeal to a broader audience than the usual devotees of classical music.

“I’ve heard from people who don’t generally listen to classical music, but they say they like listening to it as part of a video, because it gives them a way to get involved and relate the images to what they are hearing,” she said. “If this project expands interest in classical music, I see that as a bonus.”

Article by Ann Manser
Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson

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